Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

kkleiner writes "Professor at MIT Neri Oxman's creations are demonstrating the powerful combination of 3D printing and new design algorithms inspired from nature. Just as a computer printer makes copies of 2D images, 3D printers have copied an impressive variety of objects, such as robots, chairs, prosthetics, kidneys, and jaw bones, to mention a few. But Oxman and her colleagues are discovering new design and engineering principles that will help to mature 3D printing into a technology capable of producing complex and beautiful structures impossible by other manufacturing techniques."

"Most patterns in natureâ"whether scales or spiderwebsâ"have some kind of logic that can be computationally modeled. Armour is bioinspired to protect by being designed specifically to a personâ(TM)s body. Carpal Skin is a prototype of a glove aime

Impossible? No. Impractical, yes. Bordering on impossible if you want to make hundreds of the same exact shape. Of course since these are objets d'art you probably don't want too many of them. Signed, authenticated limited editions maybe?

At the risk of sounding like the typical/. nit-picker, I would have thought you'd have to use nanotechnology before you get close to making two things absolutely "identical".

Actually, there is the possibility of quantum duplication, so, though each particle has as you say a GUID, you could theoretically duplicate the quantum state of all those particles and since its arguably the information that makes something what it is, you would have precise copy. Sadly, just nanotechnology alone wouldn't accomplish this, though nanotechnology might in fact be required to entangle that many particles in a feasible amount of time.

Wrong. All electrons are identical and indistinguishable, and thereby follow Fermi-Dirac statistics. If they were anything other than identical and indistinguishable, the Pauli exclusion principle could not apply.

You are not thinking fourth dimensionally at all. Their position in the universe alone makes them unique. Every electron is sourced from the results of the big bang. Every electron can trace its origin back to that point, and the path that the electron took since that time is absolutely unique. Interchangeable (which is what you are really saying above) is not the same as absolutely identical. The electrons I am using to send this message to you are as ancient as the universe itself and each one took a dif

My work explores the relationship between the Military-Industrial Complex and counter-terrorism.

With influences as diverse as Kierkegaard and Joni Mitchell, new tensions are synthesised from both constructed and discovered meanings. Ever since I was a teenager I have been fascinated by the endless oscillation of meaning. What starts out as triumph soon becomes corrupted into a tragedy of defeat, leaving only a sense of chaos and the dawn of a new reality.

Apparently you haven't read about the difference between subtractive and additive printing. One as you say make a mold for injection. The other uses one OR MORE substances additively to create a structure. In the case of printing kidneys, hearts, or jaw bones. A solution containing cells is printed into a 3D mass to create tissues. By adding layer entire organic structures can be printed and in the near future entire organs will be printed from your own stem cells. The bones are even easier, because you only have to use organic cements that spur true bone growth as the primary structure while printing channels for blood vessels and open spaces for bone marrow. The day may come, that they can print you a whole new body.

Maybe you are right and this will happen, but if it does, nothing about the current advances in 3D printing is advancing us anywhere towards that kind of technology. Everything that's being developed right now is about sticking voxels of material together by making them hot. I don't know how cells are held together in normal biological tissue but I'm pretty sure you don't stack them together like Legos and you definitely don't melt them. The bit which crosses over, controlling where cells are positioned, is

but if it does, nothing about the current advances in 3D printing is advancing us anywhere towards that kind of technology.

Aside from developing 3D printing.

Everything that's being developed right now is about sticking voxels of material together by making them hot. I don't know how cells are held together in normal biological tissue but I'm pretty sure you don't stack them together like Legos and you definitely don't melt them.

This wouldn't be normal biological tissue because it wouldn't be produced in the normal way. I don't see bone, muscle, or tendon being printed, because I suspect these structures get some of their strength and utility from how they are grown (eg, the elongated muscle cells and tendons). But many internal organs, such as liver, kidneys, pancreas, etc have a structure that could be printed, I think. And the cells that would make up the organ have some ability to locally organ

I think it could be made to work, just with voxel based printing systems. As to the "make things hot" there are other ways to apply materials, for example via syringe. Cells are easy to squeeze like a paste (or maybe icing for a pastry). All you need is something to fix the cells into place and a means for keeping the organ alive both during and after construction.

Again, squeezing the paste is the easy bit. The "all you need" part of fixing cells in place is the bit which has nothing to do with existing 3D printing technology. Squeezing out finer pastes of molten polymers at a faster rate isn't useful. We can already squeeze cells through syringes just fine.

3D printing as it is currently practiced provides a tested system for building 3-D objects, which organs happen to be. I simply don't buy that this innovation is so paltry and simple, that it doesn't contribute to the potential technology of printing organs.

I suppose this depends if you viewed 2D printing as an exciting precursor to 3D printing. That is roughly the degree of relevance that I would ascribe 3D printing as we know it to organ printing as you describe i

The "all you need" part of fixing cells in place is the bit which has nothing to do with existing 3D printing technology.

And as I indicate with my language choice, I don't see that as a significant obstacle. Human cells tend to stick together naturally (else we'd be perhaps living puddles of goo). A more serious problem is keeping those cells alive during the process of assembly. They need oxygen and food throughout the process and they expel waste as well.

We can already squeeze cells through syringes just fine.

Exactly, which is why I don't consider that a serious issue. We have here the technological analogue to your "squeezing out finer pastes of molten polymers".

I suppose this depends if you viewed 2D printing as an exciting precursor to 3D printing. That is roughly the degree of relevance that I would ascribe 3D printing as we know it to organ printing as you describe it.

Human cells tend to stick together naturally (else we'd be perhaps living puddles of goo).

I think this quote is pretty sufficient demonstration that you don't know what you're talking about and are happy to fill in the gaps in your knowledge with flights of fancy to suit your argument. Well if the creation of rapid prototyped prostheses makes you feel any closer to the realisation of rapid prototyped than the normal passage of time then good for you, I guess.

Human cells do not "tend to stick together" any more than sintering powder or ABS pellets tend to stick together. The mechanism for sticking them together and the triggering of that mechanism is a little bit more complicated [wikipedia.org] than a bit of warming. I'm done here.

Um, no. It just means that the tech for sticking them together already exists. The human body has solved the problem. It may be a bit difficult to trigger that mechanism, but it would be foolish to consider it a huge hurdle here.

She's afforded more than most of us because she's ambitious, she's got good political skills, and she's at the Media Lab. None of these are entirely unrelated to good looks, and they're certainly related to one another. But if I really wanted to pick away at an "unfair advantage", I think I'd start with the Media Lab position -- and, for all the gripes I have about the Lab, it's not exactly a place that coddles the incompetent.